Page 4 of Orc's Veil

Outside, the Veil shudders.

I go still. Every sense sharpens, the exhaustion burning away in a flood of adrenaline. That wasn’t normal settling. That was?—

The shriek splits the air.

I’m out the door before the sound fades, running toward the stones on legs that threaten to buckle with every step. The sky seems darker than before, the moons dimmer, their light struggling to penetrate a haze that wasn’t there an hour ago.

The Veil is screaming. Not the stones—the barrier itself, the invisible wall between our world and the shadow-realm. I’ve never heard it make this sound before. In all my years of bleeding and sacrifice, I’ve felt the Veil tremble, shudder, groan. Never scream.

I reach the central stone and press my palm against it. The bandages soak through immediately, fresh blood seeping into old channels, but I barely notice the pain.

The Veil shows me.

Not with images—the boundary doesn’t communicate that cleanly. It shows me in sensations, in feelings, in the gut-deep knowledge that comes from being part of a vastness, a dying immensity. I feel the tear before I see it. A ripping, tearing agony that runs from the eastern stones to the western, splitting the barrier in a wound wider than anything I’ve ever encountered.

Then I see it.

The Veil is visible now—an impossibility made real. A shimmering curtain of pale light stretches between the stones, translucent and wavering, and running through its center is a gash. Not a tear. Not a crack. A wound, bleeding that sick luminescence into the darkness beyond.

Through the wound, I see the Shadow Court.

Faces press against the barrier from the other side—dozens of them, hundreds, a writhing mass of stolen features and hungry mouths. They’re the victims. Everyone the Veil has consumed over centuries, every traveler who couldn’t pay the tithe, every memory that was taken and devoured. They exist in there, trapped, eternal, and now they’re pushing.

Pushing to get out.

“No,” I breathe. “No, no, no?—”

I tear the bandages from my palms. Slash fresh cuts into already-bleeding skin. Press both hands to the stones and pour everything I have into the boundary, every drop of blood, every scrap of power, every fragment of stolen memory still lingering in the corners of my mind.

Close. Close. CLOSE.

The Veil drinks and drinks and drinks. I feel myself emptying, feel the darkness closing in at the edges of my vision, feel my legs start to give way. The wound in the barrier begins to shrink. Slowly. So slowly. But shrinking.

Then a presence on the other side notices me.

The faces stop pressing. The hungry mouths go still. The entire mass of trapped souls parts, drawing back from the wound, and through the gap left behind, another entity looks through.

Not a face. Not exactly. A presence—vast, old beyond reckoning, made of shadow and stolen moments and a malice I can’t define. It has no eyes, but it sees me. Has no mouth, but I feel its attention, its interest.

The wound stops closing.

I pour more of myself into the boundary, screaming now—with effort, with terror, with the desperate need to seal this thing before whatever is watching decides to do more than watch. Blood runs down my arms, soaks into the earth, floods the ancient channels until they overflow.

Not enough. It’s not enough. Nothing is ever enough.

The presence on the other side of the Veil smiles. I don’t know how I know that. It has no face. But I feel it—satisfaction, hunger, the unshakeable certainty of an entity that has been waiting a very, very long time.

Then it speaks.

The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, from the stones and the soil and the darkness pressing in from all sides. It speaks in a child’s voice—the boy’s mother, the lullaby I stole and fed to the Veil not an hour past.

“Little witch.”

The melody carries through the darkness—a lullaby turned inside out.

Ice floods my veins.

The wound in the Veil holds. Doesn’t close. Doesn’t widen. Just… holds. A permanent breach. A door left ajar.